Anne Milner is on a mission to find every variety of iris created by her
ancestor, Arthur J Bliss.

When I moved into Spring Cottage eight years ago I was faced with a bare garden and wanted to fill it as quickly as possible. One of the first things I planted, more in hope than expectation, was an unsold tall bearded iris from our village fete. It has thrilled me ever since, thriving on the edge of a sunny path with its dusky maroon falls, as tactile as velvet, under smoky upright petals. It looks violet in duller light but warms up to cocoa-pink in sunlight. Floriferous and feminine, it’s quite unlike some of the heavier modern irises with over-ruffled flowers, and the flowers seem to shrug off rain. Even better, it has flowered every year – come drought or deluge.

Lovely though it is, I never expected to know its name. However, one afternoon in the horrible summer of 2012, when the ground was too wet to garden, I took myself off to a Plant Heritage collection of Arthur Bliss irises held by Anne Milner just outside Cirencester. The first plant I saw was my splendid iris, which I now know to be 'Mrs Valerie West’. Her name was verified by local gardener, Lady Wade-Gery, who donated it: she explained that her mother had grown it for decades in Norfolk.

Since that visit I’ve found out that Arthur J Bliss (1862-1931) was a major iris breeder in the early years of the 20th century. He had an international reputation and his full-petalled irises changed the direction of iris breeding. Bliss was the son of an Oxford vicar called William Bliss and Arthur was the oldest son of 11 children. The family budget precluded him from going to university, although all seven sons were educated at Stonyhurst College, a catholic boarding school in Lancashire. Bliss, who is thought to have been a civil engineer, worked in New Zealand and South Africa. However, he went deaf, possibly after an accident, and retired aged 40. He moved to the Devon village of Morwellham Quay on the banks of the River Tamar in 1912 and devoted himself to breeding irises. He was encouraged by Britain’s foremost iris authority, William Rickatson Dykes, secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society 1921-25. Following Dykes’s tragic death in a road accident in 1925, the Dykes Medal was created and it’s still awarded annually to the best tall bearded iris.

Bliss set about unravelling several species (I. pallida, I. amoena, I. plicata, I. neglecta and I. squalens) with the help of Dykes and used them in his meticulously recorded breeding programme in a quest to create a red iris. The red evaded him and breeders are still trying today. However, in 1917 Bliss offered 'Dominion’ for sale, a ground-breaking purple iris with rounded dark velvety falls. Laetitia Munro (writing in Roots, the journal of the Historic Iris Preservation Society), explains that Bliss crossed a rosy iris 'Cordelia’ with a purple species – I. macrantha. In 1905 two seeds were harvested, but they did not germinate until 1907. One purple two-tone iris flowered in 1909; Bliss was disappointed because he was hoping for a redder flower. In 1910, when it flowered again, it caught the eye of Bliss’s 10-year-old niece Phyllis. She admired it greatly. 'Dominion’ was the iris that would make Bliss world-famous.

Anne is related to Bliss and his helper Phyllis. Her interest began in 1988 when she was asked by a cousin if she would like a couple of Uncle Arthur’s irises. “My cousin gave me what she thought was 'Dominion’ and 'Cardinal’ [a lilac with prune-purple falls]. However they turned out to be 'Morwell’ [a mid-blue from 1917] and 'Pioneer’ [a violet-purple from 1924] instead,” Anne recalls. These irises had been handed down from her cousin’s mother Phyllis, the child who had admired 'Dominion’.

“We got a list, compiled by the British Iris Society, of all the 100 or so Bliss irises and we both set about trying to find the others,” Anne told me. 'Bruno’ (1922), one of the parents of my 'Mrs Valerie West’, was found in the Botanic Garden at Oxford and thankfully rescued before the iris beds were replaced by prairie planting. Others were tracked down in America and another, 'Sweet Lavender’, was located at the now defunct Croftway Nursery in Sussex in 1990.

It’s taken Anne 20 years to amass and verify her collection of 40 using nursery catalogues, The Gardener’s Chronicle, the RHS herbarium and an older publication called The Gardener. Plant Heritage has “opened a lot of doors” she explains. “It brought me into contact with other Plant Heritage collection holders, including Sarah Cook who holds Sir Cedric Morris’s Benton End irises. The two are staging an exhibit at Hampton Court.

Anne Milner's home and garden, where over 40 Bliss irises are grown

I warm to Uncle Arthur the more I learn. Most horticulturalists in his day tended to be formal, stuffed shirts with lots of gardeners who did all the work for them. Bliss did it on his own and attracted the world’s most famous iris growers to his small village. A bachelor, he moved there to be near his brother Theodore Stephen, estate manager to the Duke of Bedford.

His brother was married to Susan Bliss, immortalised by a pink iris named in 1922. There is also a 'Duke of Bedford’ (1922) and somewhere a pretty lavender called 'Phyllis Bliss’ (1919) which is on Anne’s most-wanted list. “Generally, Bliss didn’t name irises after people,” Anne says. “He always said he didn’t want to discard a friend.” So it is especially intriguing to know who 'Mrs Valerie West’ was.

Arthur had two hillside allotments which he used for his irises and his other two passions – daffodils and gladioli, but Anne has been unable to track down any Bliss narcissi. One of his earliest irises was named 'Morwell’ in 1917 and it was this plant that first brought Bliss to the attention of the iris fraternity. When it was trialled at RHS Wisley it impressed all, including a famous nurseryman called Robert Wallace. He wrote to and then visited Bliss to find out more, and soon Wallace’s world-famous iris nursery began to market Bliss irises every year. The best ones were expensive, costing five guineas a root. That’s roughly £250 today, so they found their way into the gardens of the wealthy all over the world. It may explain why 'Mrs Valerie West’ came from one of the nobler members of my village.

'Morwell’ may have put him on the map, but 'Dominion’ was Bliss’s most important iris. It revolutionised iris breeding, replacing the conventional willowy shape with narrow petals with the ample, curved irises we grow today. It spawned a Dominion race which includes 'Bruno’, 'Cardinal’ and my lovely 'Mrs Valerie West’.

“He was an eccentric who lived a simple life,” Anne says. “His office papers and plant notebooks were stuffed under the lid of a grand piano and he wrote down his latest crosses on the floor in chalk. He didn’t stand on ceremony, lived in a disorderly muddle and was notoriously badly dressed. He travelled everywhere by motorbike into old age, finally dying from pneumonia in 1931 aged 69.” In contrast, his plant records and his gardens were meticulously kept.

Despite living simply, Bliss managed to travel to Paris in 1922 to meet with iris breeders and he may have even gone to the United States. Bliss wrote widely in journals such as The Gardeners’ Chronicle and was key in setting up iris societies in France and the US. One of his irises, 'Grace Sturtevant’ (named after the foremost female American iris breeder in 1932) was featured as a Will’s cigarette card in a 1938 series entitled “Flowers – New Varieties”.

Just like Arthur, Anne keeps meticulous records, available on her website. Her collection is open by appointment in iris time. The National Trust garden in Wiltshire, The Courts, is also setting up a collection. Anne continues to hunt for more, although only one or two a year turn up. She believes more are to be found, particularly in old French gardens. Uncle Arthur’s irises and his memory will be preserved for posterity so that others can enjoy them. That’s what a national collection is all about.